Female Teachers. The common school reforms firmly established the institutional structure of public education as well as the ideology of universal education. But the key to making the new schools efficient and productive was the teacher. Before the school reform movement teachers had little training and few effective textbooks on which to rely. Almost everything that occurred in the classroom depended on the direct relationship between teacher and student. A good teacher meant a good school, but the practice of using untrained college students as school teachers made that result unlikely. After 1820, however, a change came about in the profession of school teaching as male teachers were increasingly replaced by young, unmarried women. In Massachusetts, for example, the percentage of male teachers in the public schools fell from around 60 in 1840 to less than 14 percent by 1860. The schoolmaster gave way to the schoolmarm in state after.....
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